Haydn: Piano Sonata No. 7 in D major, Hob.XVII:D1

This useful set gathers up the many shorter works that Haydn wrote for the keyboard: many minuets of light character and charming temperament and variation sets of great melodic invention. He arranged many movements from his chamber and orchestral works, doubtless encouraged by his fame and his publisher to bring his music to even greater domestic popularity in a world where live music was far more often heard on the piano at home than in great concert halls. Finally, there is his great cycle of Seven Last Words: seven poignant slow movements with an introduction and final ‘Earthquake’ originally commissioned for choir and orchestra for Lisbon Cathedral, but which quickly achieved a reputation for their sober beauty out of proportion to the specific conditions of their context: hence this arrangement made by another party. Bart van Oort is a scholar-performer who has extensively researched and performed the music of Haydn and his time (including contributions made to Brilliant Classics’ complete set of the composer’s piano sonatas). Here he performs on a fine modern reproduction of a fortepiano by Walter, a maker esteemed by Haydn and Beethoven.

Olbertz’s recordings of all Haydn’s Piano Sonatas enable the development of one of the most important “avant-garde composers” of Viennese Classicism to be followed in an exemplary way. The almost fifty works abound in surprises, and Olbertz interprets them with great clarity, elegance and esprit.

It was in Haydn's hands that the keyboard sonata developed from a simple drawing-room divertimento to the level of a high art-form and the greatest among his sonatas have an intellectual rigour and a dramatic sweep that were rarely equalled by Mozart, and not surpassed until Beethoven revolutionized the form in the closing years of the eighteenth century. His earliest sonatas were composed with the harpsichord in mind, but in later years he began increasingly to exploit dynamic contrasts of a kind that could only be obtained on the fortepiano.

It is only comparatively recently that Haydn’s piano sonatas started to feature in recitals, and some of the major pianists of our time have added some of them to their repertoire – Alfred Brendel being perhaps the most illustrious champion of this neglected area of Haydn’s output.

Even with this re-awakening of interest, out of the 60 works concerned, only a handful appear in recital. To compare them with Mozart’s sonatas is as unfair as the often comparison of Schubert’s sonatas with those of Beethoven. Mozart’s sonatas display the cantible of the operatic aria or lied, and have a distinctly ‘south of the Alps’feel to them.

Haydn’s influences come from further north in Berlin and Hamburg. CPE Bach’s sonata’s appeared during the 1740s, and the last appeared in 1787, and the influence of these works was as profound on the young Beethoven as it was on the older Haydn. The first 15 Haydn sonatas date from around 1760, and were probably intended as teaching pieces. Nos.16-19 and 28 belong to a transitional period, Nos.21-27 are sadly lost, and No. 20 and Nos29-62 representing the differing phases of Haydn’s maturity. Of these Nos.48-52 date from 1777-9, and the last three sonatas, Nos 60-62 were composed in London during Haydn’s second UK visit in 1794-5.

All the hallmarks of Haydn can be found in the sonatas, dramatic contrasts between light and dark shadings, sudden pauses and switching between piano and forte – sometimes for drama, often for humour – all foreshadow his unruly and headstrong pupil Ludwig van Beethoven.